Three Capsule Reviews That Rise in the Air in a Threatening Manner
They Flew (history; 2023; written by Carlos Eire)
An utterly fascinating work of history by the National Book Award-winning author of Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003). His day job is “teaching early modern history,” and that was actually the context in which I first heard of him—I took a couple graduate history classes as electives late in my MFA because I was sick of having the same six conversations about literary works every week and wanted to have six new-ish conversations about something else. I should have taken Greek and Hebrew. Nevertheless they were great classes, and one of them was on early modernity, where Eire’s War Against the Idols (1986) was on the list. His major survey of the period, Reformations (2016), hadn’t come out yet. This book is just about early modern levitators and bilocators: Christians, almost always Catholic, who after sustained mystical contemplation and severe mortifications would be treated by God to a little unplanned levitating, and also, occasionally, appearing in more than one place at the same time. (“Levitation” is the wrong word. It’s a nineteenth-century word coined by Spiritualists who were part of the long process by which America restored a little of the magic and weirdness that Protestantism had razored away. Early Protestantism was fully committed to the idea that the age of miracles had died out, and that most apparent miracles were done by Satan to prop up the image of the Romish Abomination. I learned all these things from Eire.) He studies Teresa of Avila, who flew so often that she begged God to make it stop—it brought unwanted attention, including potentially that of the Inquisition, and also I’m guessing it’s pretty weird to just be flying around with no control over the experience—and Joseph of Cupertino, and then a couple of fake flyers and pretend bilocators, who were determined by the Inquisition to have lied about it, as well as one edge case, the realness of whose miracles is a kind of Vatican “cold case.” As far as whether these were cases of exaggerated reporting or mass hallucination, Eire takes the utterly baller position staked out by the title. The world is weird. People do be flying.